DESCRIPTIONAlfresco BART is a tool written in shell script on top of Duplicity for Alfresco backups and restore from a local file system, FTP, SCP or Amazon S3 of all its components: indexes, data base, content store and all deployment and configuration files. It should runs in most Linux distributions, for Windows you may use Cygwin (non tested yet).

Brief description of its features: full and incremental backups, backup policies, backup volume control, encryption with GPG, compression. Also it has a restore wizard with shortcuts for quick restore of some key components (alfresco-global.properties and more).

DISCLAIMER
This is an initial version, it has bugs and needs many improvements, please take care :)

Like this:

Duplicity is a python command line tool for encrypted bandwidth-efficient backup.

In their creator words: “Duplicity incrementally backs up files and directory by encrypting tar-format volumes with GnuPG and uploading them to a remote (or local) file server. Currently local, ftp, sftp/scp, rsync, WebDAV, WebDAVs, Google Docs, HSi and Amazon S3 backends are available. Because duplicity uses librsync, the incremental archives are space efficient and only record the parts of files that have changed since the last backup. Currently duplicity supports deleted files, full Unix permissions, directories, symbolic links, fifos, etc., but not hard links.”

My brief description: a free and open source tool for doing full and incremental backup and restore from linux to local or almost any remote target, compressed and encrypted. A charm for any sys admin.

In order to explain how Duplicity works for backup and restore. I’m going to show how to do a backup of a folder called “sample_data” to an Amazon S3 bucket called “alfresco-backup” and a folder called “test” inside my bucket (use your own bucket name) the bucket and folder has been created by me before running any command but could be created by duplicity first time we run the command. If you want to let Duplicity create your own Amazon S3 bucket and you are located in Europe, please read the Duplicity man page.

Note: please not get confused with my bucket name “alfresco-backup”, use your own bucket name. I will use this bucket name also in future articles ;)

How to install Duplicity in Ubuntu:

# sudo apt-get install duplicity

Create a gpg key and remember the passphrase because will be required by Duplicity, defaults values works good. Your backup will be encrypted with the passphrase, all files created by command below will be on your Linux home/.gnupg but you won’t need that at all:

# gpg --gen-key

Create required system variables (you can also use them with an script):

You can see 3 files and 2 directories, in the statistics report duplicity counts any directory as file.

Restore:

Duplicity can also manage the restore process but it will never override any existing file, the you can restore to a different location or remove your corrupted or old data if you want to restore in the original place. If duplicity successfully completes the restore it is not going to show any output.

also you can use for example 6M (six months), 30D (30 days) or 60m (60 minutes).

To see more information when you are running a duplicity command can use the vervosity flag -v [1-9] but also can see all logs here /root/.cache/duplicity/[directory with unique ID]/duplicity-full.YYYMMDDT182930Z.manifest.part

When you are finished playing with Duplicity and Amazon S3 remember to clean your passphrase and Amazon keys from the variables: